NEVER COME BACK

ALICE KINERK

When a person leaves for the grocery store there is a good chance she’ll come back. I mean, groceries suggest cooking. Cooking suggests home. There is almost zero chance your spouse turns the onions to low, races off to Ralph’s for that jar of oregano she had been certain was in the cabinet somewhere, never to be seen again.

But that’s what I did. That’s the mystery Jez now lives with. Sometimes I wonder, did he let the onions burn? Jez is no cook. He keeps a respectful distance from the culinary tools of the trade. He can operate a microwave. For anything beyond that he’s got me.

So, did he eventually decide to turn the burner off, or did the police do it after he called them? And when did he call them? And how did he sound? I have, for a long time, imagined the recording. Did his voice waver? I wonder, did Jez remember specifically that I went out for oregano? What words did he use? Did he say “I don’t know where she went” or did he say “She went to Ralph’s for oregano and never came back.” I want to know.

Time to address the elephant in the room. I went for oregano, not drugs. I’m not a secret drug dealer. I know so little about drugs that I don’t know if “oregano” is code for marijuana. Everything I know about drugs I read in a paperback called Just Say No. I found the book in my brother Felix’s closet one night after he left. The pages smelled like dust, and there was a photo of Nancy Reagan on the cover. Old Nance had kindly included a list of slang terms that the reader might encounter. Oregano was on it.

I only bring it up now because one of the possibilities I’ve considered— and believe me, with the free time I have, it becomes natural, habitual, to consider possibilities—is that the police mistook Jez’s mention of oregano for narcotics, and went around flashing my photo in the face of every emaciated addict in town. Do you know a woman named Luann Briggs? That is, of course, if Jez remembered it was oregano at all.

Let me start again. It was an autumn evening. I was cooking dinner. We were out of oregano. I turned the burner down, grabbed my purse, and yelled up the stairs “I’m going to Ralph’s! We’re out of oregano!” Jez had told me he was going to be job-hunting online, but I could hear Sports Center returning from commercial break.

“Have fun,” he yelled.

So, I drove to Ralph’s. It was terrible. What is it about driving that I don’t like exactly? It’s no one thing. When I get in the car, I’m trying not to worry about what is wrong with the brakes we can’t afford to fix, and not get annoyed by the cracked windshield that’s all smeared because the defroster crapped out a year ago and we’ve been wipe-by-hand since. I don’t want to look at the paint peeling off and rust coming up, or the gray silt caked in the door jambs, or smell the sun-baked plastic.

When I first turned sixteen, it was the action of pressing the accelerator that used to get me. The guilt, I mean. Dino bones burning under my foot would make my whole right leg go numb. I would get out of the car and stumble. That never happens now. Who knows why.

Anyway, I drove to Ralph’s. I was thinking about the argument Jez and I had the previous night, which started off when I’d complained about how my floor supervisor at MetaGen was never listening, always talking over me. Jez had yeah, yeah, yeah’ed, head bobbing with what I’d thought was empathy, but no! Jez was only waiting to one-up me with a story about a guy he’d worked with who had done the very same thing! (The irony was lost on him.) It was a story he’d told before, and I said so. He sat up straight in bed and tucked his chin down. An ugly look. “You have a job. I don’t. Does rubbing my face in that fact make you feel better?”

I just lay there reeling. Of course, I didn’t like it that Jez didn’t have a job. The number one thing I wanted from life was a husband with a job! I had been totally hung up on the idea that once Jez worked, our marriage would work. But Sports Center was forecasting playoffs and I was wellvaped. Articulating specific thoughts suddenly felt like too much to bear, so I . . . didn’t.

I mean, I love Jez. I loved him. When I said To have and to hold. To love and to cherish, I really did believe, at the time, that I loved him. We had good fun. We had good sex. I used to feel like a flower when I was on top of him, like a rose budding, blooming, blossoming, as I came. It’s different now. These days, during sex, all I can think about is the clashing of bodies, the endless pushing together and pulling apart. It’s analogous to the rhythm of our relationship, the way periodic arguments perforate our peace. I loved Jez. Do I still love Jez? Who knows.

And what is love, am I right? I wish there was some sort of peerreviewed, super-accurate definitive test. Like, just drop a sample of your love in this glass, stir, and observe if the water turns red or blue. Because sometimes it is hard to know! Sometimes I wonder, what if I’ve never been in love? What if everything I thought was love was just a dollop of dopamine? What if I’ve just learned to mimic the way other people act when they are in love? Maybe I’m walking around in human clothes, playacting at something everyone else understands but me? I used to feel this way a lot around Jez, I mean, back when we lived together. I used to imagine there was one wall in our house made out of glass, and on the other side visitors come to view the “human” in her “life of domestic tranquility.” Munch some popcorn, point, laugh, then wander off to the reptile house. Because that’s how it used to feel!

Anyway, I drove to Ralph’s. At the intersection, a dog stopped to sniff, and a teenager yanked the collar so hard its front paws went up. Sometimes it’s the little things. Because I’m always the dog in the situation, you know? I turned away. I turned on the radio news. A woman was having a hard time getting words out. Her first language was Spanish, I could tell from her round vowels. Take your time, the reporter said. I might never see my children again, the woman said. I switched to a different news station, heard one word nuclear and switched again. This time to music because sometimes music helps.

That’s another thing I hate about driving. Sometimes my blood pressure does loop-de-loops. First my heart beats hard, then everything drops through the floor—fawhoomp. Then my vision narrows and there’s this half fuzz/half terror that makes it hard to think, but at the same time feels like floating, like I’m floating above and behind my physical self, like my body is a marionette, and the real me is up above, pulling strings. Which is fine when you’re sitting down to Sports Center, but not so much when driving. To reset, you have to tighten yourself up, push the blood around. I’ve learned to clench my sphincter, clench my jaw, clench my fists.

So, I arrived at Ralph’s, tight as a clam. I pulled in, took a sharp left to my favorite spot, a place I called the overlooked spot. (I had this thing about parking. Cruising around infuriated me. Waste of time and gas. Then you have to remember where you parked afterward! Always look for an overlooked spot. All lots have one. Overlooked spots are conveniently located, yet rarely occupied. Overlooked spots are out of sight until you are almost upon them. Look for moss on the pavement. Once I found an overlooked spot, I never parked anywhere else.)

I entered Ralph’s. I walked to Baking/Spices. I located a jar of Spice Island brand oregano. I purchased said oregano. I walked back to my car. I took out my keys. But I didn’t get in. In the little wedge of woods that separates the suburban parking lot from the suburban road, there’s a picnic table. It’s been there since forever. Which higher-up at Ralph’s gave the green light for a parking lot picnic table? I’d like to know. I have this thing about underused picnic tables. I mean, maybe I do. I walked into the little woods, swung a leg over, plopped down and poked at my phone. It had suddenly become the perfect moment to text my mom.

Sry about Sat!!

Did U clean up @ Felix’s grave? TY!!

CU next month!!

Love you miss you

I knew I should write more, but there was this aroma. Buttery, vanilla birthday cake. It distracted me into hitting SEND. It was weird. I knew Ralph's bakery was washing up by noon. There were only two other businesses in the Ralph’s plaza. A barbershop and the DMV. Neither of which emitted an aroma of cake. There’s also a stand-alone Starbucks store (plus Ralph’s in-store mini, of course, with our proximity to Seattle) but Starbucks just smells like Starbucks.

Well. It smelled stronger as I walked away from the picnic table and into the green strip, past a ragged plug of scotch broom wearing a windblown bag. Birthday cake aroma was literally blowing against my face. My hair did the supermodel thing. I looked around.

Under the sprawl of a huckleberry bush was a manhole cover. A big, metal, standard size manhole cover, just lying there. I pushed it with one foot. I saw a hole. I dropped to my knees and shoved the manhole cover all the way to one side and bent down closer. It was a large hole. It did not go straight down like a well, but sloped off like the tunnel slide at Water Country. The Twister, that’s what it was called. I always loved the Twister. What is it about dropping yourself into something you can’t see and letting yourself be whisked away? It’s the same morbid curiosity that got me married at 23.

The birthday cake aroma was blowing up and out. I leaned in but it was too dark. I took a breath, dropped to my knees, and stuck my whole head inside.

The jar of oregano rolled from my open purse.

There was the thunk of glass hitting ground. But no splash of standing water. No curious claws of creatures dark and dangerous.

At this point a normal person would have stood up, brushed off the dirt, walked back across the parking lot, and purchased another jar of Spice Island brand oregano. It’s like what, three dollars and seventy-nine cents? That would be the normal thing, am I right? But not me.

I turned on my flashlight app. I strapped my purse messenger-style across my shoulders, zipped it closed, and lowered my head and shoulders into the hole. I reached in. My fingers waggled at air. My bottom half failed to provide sufficient leverage, and I began to slip head first into the hole. It happened fast and was unstoppable. I skidded in on my chin. My neck bled. There was dirt in the space between my bottom teeth and my bottom lip.

I spent a long time coughing and spitting, then wiped my eyes and looked around. I took off my purse and dropped the stupid bottle of oregano inside, zipped it closed, and patted it.

It was not just a pit, it was the entry to something larger. I mean, I’d guessed that already, from the cake scent. There was a hallway. It was not a dug-dirt hallway, but a standard underground cement hallway with a tile floor all shiny-wet and cracked. Every ten or twelve feet halogen light, dim and flickering. Nothing at the end but a corner that went off toward Ralph’s.

Above me, the surface was close. If I were to stand below the opening and raise my hands, my fingertips would be above grass. The packed dirt slide had a couple huckleberry roots alongside it. They were thick roots and well placed as handles. I could have hoisted myself out. I could have left (I still could leave) at any time. I could have stood up, brushed off the dirt, climbed out, and gone home. At that point, I was still thinking I would.

Let me start again. I was born in Cleveland on September 27th, 1986, just a hop/skip/jump from a little disaster known as BalloonFest ‘86; maybe you’ve heard of it? The local United Way had sent schoolkids out selling balloons for fifty cents each. It was a fundraiser. Also, going for a Guinness. The Cleveland tykes sold 1.4 million balloons.

There’s photos. My favorite is an aerial shot when the balloons were still held down. They’re tented to the ground with a series of ropes. They look, in sum, like the segmented exoskeleton of some monstrous multicolored arthropod bent on consuming C-Town.

But when it was time for the release! They shot straight up! Everyone in the Terminal Tower crowd lolled their heads back and began screaming, and oh, the joy! Ecstasy! Euphoria! Exhilaration!

It is impossible to describe BalloonFest ‘86 without innuendo.

But afterward what did they think would happen? Did they not understand the basic law of gravity? You can go down and never come back up, sure, but the opposite is never true. What goes up always, always, in some form, at some point, eventually, will come down.

In the first hours of my life, drifting balloons mesmerized drivers and caused accidents. Balloons screwed up air traffic control. They had to ground flights. Two fishermen on Lake Erie somehow died. After BalloonFest, Guinness announced they would no longer keep records of stunts which were damaging to the environment.

My mom had a photo of me in a stroller. Newborn, flappy neck. My father’s left hand is on the stroller and his right is holding a pink balloon. My mom says our street was covered with BalloonFest balloons the day they drove me home from the hospital but even so, no pink one. He wouldn’t let her take the picture until he found a pink balloon. That had made my mom laugh. (She never laughed, telling about it.) She says he walked all over our block, pushing me in that stroller, and when he found a pink balloon, he rushed right back home and she took the picture. It is the only picture of me with my dad that I have. ***

In front of me, in the pit, at the end of the hall, a hunched-over man hobbled several steps and then paused. “Who’s that? Marlena, is that you? I heard coughing. You’re going to be late! It’s Al. Run on over here. Walk beside me. I know I’m late. We can be late together.”

Right away he reminded me of my grandpa. I guess at first I assumed I had stumbled across some overlooked fire escape into a retirement home. That I was being mistaken for a caregiver. I thought at any moment we would come across the real caregiver, Marlena I guess, and there would be laughter, apologies, gratitude, possibly birthday cake?

I turned off my flashlight app and did my best to wipe the dirt from my T-shirt. I did not run to this old man Al (because of wet tiles), but walked with my shoulders back in the sort of business-like way I imagined Marlena might walk. Calm but quick. I was faking the calm part, obviously. This was a nightmarish feel to the experience. I wanted to run.

“Thanks,” Al said after I’d slipped my shoulder underneath his arm and we’d begun hobbling along, me at a half-hunch to accommodate. “Now. What is your name?”

“Marlena.” It just rolled off my tongue. Grampa had lived with us, in Felix’s room, after he left. I’m not proud. But I will say I know how dementia makes you easy to manipulate.

“Marlena?” Al sounded surprised.

“That’s right, Al!” My voice was warm and cheery. “You know me!”

Al nodded in a slow way as if he really wasn’t sure. “How’s the Overlooked Spot?” ***

Well. I would like to state, in the time since, in the copious hours I have now just to sit and think, when I have chosen to reflect and ask myself when the balance tipped in favor of me never going back, when it was I began to think I didn’t actually want to return to Jez, but instead wanted to stay there, live forever underneath Ralph’s; well, it was then.

Because until Al asked about the overlooked spot, I’d considered myself a visitor to these parts. I had been trying to keep myself calm by visualizing my escape route behind me. I’d been playing the good girl scout, upstanding and honorable and crap. But I was very much looking forward to being home, finally taking those onions off the heat, sprinkling that oregano, finally sitting down to dinner. Describing my adventures to Jez. No, seriously! Not fucking with you! And vaping out to Sports Center afterward.

But when Al brought up the overlooked spot all I could think was How?

He’d even used those words, the overlooked spot, a term I myself came up with, and had never spoken aloud to anyone, never once, not even to Jez. So how could Al have known? Was he a mind reader? Had he been traveling through time? How? How? How? My brain became a hamster wheel. It was a miracle I didn’t drop the guy.

In the time since, I have come to understand that all of us living here under Ralph’s arrived the same way. Improbable as it may sound, dodging the minefield of modern life, merely continuing to exist amid the pressure led each of us to start anew.

And there’s a lot of us down here. More than two dozen. Almost three? I know it sounds unlikely. But we are a self-selected group, and as such we share many commonalities. Not that we’re all Luann Briggs clones, with limp curls and a lopsided snaggletoothed smile. You get the idea. We share a heart.

When a person leaves for the grocery store, there is a good chance she’ll come back. But there is, of course, no guarantee. Maybe she stumbles across a secret underground utopia which does a better job meeting her social-emotional needs, and also has cake.

Maybe what they like under Ralph’s is everything that’s not there. No debts. No “convenient” monthly payments that barely cover interest. No sunshiney daytime to fritter away, no insomniac night to endure. No cell phone signal, so no way to receive bad news. No texts, so no need to text back. No clock, no watch, no calendar. No blithe Christians full of comfort and proselytizing. No Let go. Let God. No overzealous United Way volunteers vomiting latex and helium into the sky. No teenagers yanking dog collars. No car. No need for sphincter-clenching or looking away. No floor supervisor cutting off your words. No MetaGen. No endless workday. No clothes to wash. No chores to do. No appearances to keep up. No absentee father. No guilt-trip mom. No purple-face, won’t-breathe, won’t-wake-up, won’t-respond-to-Narcan brother. No Sports Center. No job search. No onions. No Jez.

In a situation like that, a person may very well decide to say fuck it, never to be seen again.

I will say that here, under Ralph’s, we have conversations. Conversations are something people have when time allows. We talk about all sorts of things. We laugh. We share anecdotes. Stories about life before. We make conjectures about life today. At all times, whatever the topic, we use a wise tone, the kind of tone that makes both speaker and listener feel better about themselves, allows everyone to believe they are privy to some insider information, makes them think they know best about how other people ought to live their lives.

A few hours after I’d skidded in and helped Al to the party room, I had gotten to know some folks. Caroline, Ms. Betsy, Bunny, Yesenaria, and Pete were the first to introduce themselves. All lovely. And then, after I’d been filled to the brim with birthday cake—birthdays being something that are celebrated any day, for anyone, symbolizing the sort of pure joy, the joie de vivre, the simple appreciation for life that people have here— after all that happened, after I’d been friended and fed and was feeling good, I was rather suddenly brought to sit before Al.

Even back then, I could tell Al was some sort of leader; I could tell from the way everyone sort of stepped away and looked at him when he was getting ready to speak.

Ms. Betsy and Bunny and I had been bonding over tales of married life when the two of them began insisting we go somewhere called the Reading Room and take part in something called The Giving Up. So I did. I walked with them to a room at the far end of the hall that had been filled with books, high-back reading chairs, a Harstine couch, and everywhere tall floor lamps glowing warm yellow. There was even a braided rug. It was all quite homey and put me at ease. (I was already at ease.) I sat in a chair facing Al, and everyone else sort of filled in around, and Al began.

“She helped when asked,” Al began. “But she didn’t give her name. She lied.”

From around the room there were nods, crossed arms, and sighs of disappointment.

“It would be kind of us to let her stay. But understandable if we kicked her out.”

“Kick her out!” a man behind me shouted. It sounded like that’s what he said. Maybe the first word, “Don’t,” got caught in a dry throat. Regardless, I panicked. By this point, just a few hours in, I already felt a weird allegiance.

“No! Don’t! Let me stay! Please! My name is Luann!”

“Luann?” Al leaned forward. The room quieted.

I nodded. “I’m sorry for lying.”

“Are you prepared to stay here under Ralph’s forever?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. There was a pause. “I didn’t pack a toothbrush.”

Everyone laughed. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that everything a person could want was procured with a simple overnight trip upstairs to Ralph’s. I laughed too, because why not? I laughed at myself. “I mean, yes.”

“Yes?” Al laughed like my grandpa, like all old men. Honk-and-nod.

“Yes. I want to stay.”

There was a great and sudden cheer.

Al brought silence with his arm. “Are you prepared for The Giving Up?”

“Yes!” I did not want to backtrack on everyone’s enthusiasm. Details felt unimportant.

More cheering. Al stood. I stood. He shook my hand. Then I was hugging strangers.

At some point amidst the congratulating, Bunny came up and took my purse off my shoulders. Ms. Betsy (with whom I had already shared a great deal of details regarding my life/marriage) opened my purse, took out the bottle of Spice Island oregano, and handed it to me. Then my purse (with my car keys, cell phone, RFID driver’s license, maxed out Mastercard, and anything else personal and identifiable were taken from my possession. I got to keep my pipe, of course. Everyone under Ralph’s keeps their own pipes.

Later, I came to understand that my cracked windshield shitbox was driven to some random somewhere, wiped of prints, and abandoned. My cell phone was tossed into the Puget Sound. My credit cards were destroyed. All of this was done in order to protect the secrecy of our encampment under Ralph’s. It was The Giving Up.

With all these months and years of missing folks, who knows what the police have figured out. It is a frequent subject of conversation. Sometimes we imagine that our left-behind spouses and family members have teamed up, formed a support group for themselves. Maybe they’re playing junior sleuths, like in a movie, and they’ll be the ones to discover us in the end. Maybe they’re a strong team, and closing in on us quick. Or maybe they grieve individually.

One thing we know is they need us more than we need them. We don’t need them! We don’t miss them! We don’t miss anything about the way our lives used to be. Why would we? Our lives down here are full. We have everything. Food. Friends. Time. Quiet. Dark. Books. Conversations. Peace. Sex. Drugs.

These days, when I tell stories about Jez, I usually call him Fuzz. Because that’s what he is. Someone I used to care about but has become increasingly irrelevant.

There is one rule: no couples. Once there are couples there are factions, and once there are factions there is division, and unity, above all, unity must be preserved. We are taught to love one another equally, and we do. Yes, yes, yes to whatever it is you are imagining. We’re not just an all-thetime orgy here. But we are a never-ending, slow-roll orgy, plus conversation/cuddles. ***

This is all to say, when that day comes, finally, finally, that our understaffed, undertrained police department does raid our utopia, we have a plan. We sit on chaise lounges filched from Ralph’s Memorial Day sale and draw fantasies out to their most glorious conclusions.

Our plan is to scatter. We will go like rats into the darkest depths, the unfinished parts we have been burrowing in anticipation of this day. When they come for us, we will wedge ourselves. We will press our skin and bones into the nooks and crannies. We’ll close our eyes and hold our breaths. We’ll grab onto overhead huckleberry roots and hold fast.

Please come back! they are begging us already in our imaginations.

We’re never coming back! we will reply.

And we mean it, we do. We’ll never come back. Never, never, never, never, never.

Alice Kinerk earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington and then spent the following years raising children and not writing much. Now that she’s changed her last dirty diaper, she’s back to hitting that keyboard! Her short stories have been published in Oyster River Pages, Johnny America, Rock Salt Journal, and elsewhere.